RESEARCH ARTICLE RLT-S: A Web System for Record Linkage

Background Record linkage integrates records across multiple related data sources identifying dupli-cates and accounting for possible errors. Real life applications require efficient algorithms to merge these voluminous data sources to find out all records belonging to same individuals. Our recently devised highly efficient record linkage algorithms provide best-known solutions to this challenging problem. Method We have developed RLT-S, a freely available web tool, which implements our single linkage clustering algorithm for record linkage. This tool requires input data sets and a small set of configuration settings about these files to work efficiently. RLT-S employs exact match clus-tering, blocking on a specified attribute and single linkage based hierarchical clustering among these blocks. Results RLT-S is an implementation package of our sequential record linkage algorithm. It outper-forms previous best-known implementations by a large margin. The tool is at least two times faster for any dataset than the previous best-known tools. Conclusions RLT-S tool implements our record linkage algorithm that outperforms previous best-known algorithms in this area. This website also contains necessary information such as instruc-tions, submission history, feedback, publications and some other sections to facilitate the usage of the tool. Availability RLT-S is integrated int